Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

Thomas Hardy

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

MOMENTS OF VISION

      That mirror

   Which makes of men a transparency,

      Who holds that mirror

And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see

      Of you and me?

      That mirror

   Whose magic penetrates like a dart,

      Who lifts that mirror

And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,

      Until we start?

      That mirror

   Works well in these night hours of ache;

      Why in that mirror

Are tincts we never see ourselves once take

      When the world is awake?

      That mirror

   Can test each mortal when unaware;

      Yea, that strange mirror

May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,

      Glassing it – where?

THE VOICE OF THINGS

Forty Augusts – aye, and several more – ago,

   When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,

The waves huzza’d like a multitude below

   In the sway of an all-including joy

      Without cloy.

Blankly I walked there a double decade after,

   When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,

And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter

   At the lot of men, and all the vapoury

      Things that be.

Wheeling change has set me again standing where

   Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;

But they supplicate now – like a congregation there

   Who murmur the Confession – I outside,

      Prayer denied.

“WHY BE AT PAINS?”

(

Wooer’s Song

)

Why be at pains that I should know

   You sought not me?

Do breezes, then, make features glow

   So rosily?

Come, the lit port is at our back,

   And the tumbling sea;

Elsewhere the lampless uphill track

   To uncertainty!

O should not we two waifs join hands?

   I am alone,

You would enrich me more than lands

   By being my own.

Yet, though this facile moment flies,

   Close is your tone,

And ere to-morrow’s dewfall dries

   I plough the unknown.

“WE SAT AT THE WINDOW”

(

Bournemouth

, 1875)

We sat at the window looking out,

And the rain came down like silken strings

That Swithin’s day.  Each gutter and spout

Babbled unchecked in the busy way

   Of witless things:

Nothing to read, nothing to see

Seemed in that room for her and me

   On Swithin’s day.

We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,

For I did not know, nor did she infer

How much there was to read and guess

By her in me, and to see and crown

   By me in her.

Wasted were two souls in their prime,

And great was the waste, that July time

   When the rain came down.

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK

(

Circa

 1850)

   On afternoons of drowsy calm

      We stood in the panelled pew,

Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm

      To the tune of “Cambridge New.”

   We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,

      The clouds upon the breeze,

Between the whiles of glancing at our books,

      And swaying like the trees.

   So mindless were those outpourings! —

      Though I am not aware

That I have gained by subtle thought on things

      Since we stood psalming there.

AT THE WICKET-GATE

There floated the sounds of church-chiming,

   But no one was nigh,

Till there came, as a break in the loneness,

   Her father, she, I.

And we slowly moved on to the wicket,

   And downlooking stood,

Till anon people passed, and amid them

   We parted for good.

Greater, wiser, may part there than we three

   Who parted there then,

But never will Fates colder-featured

   Hold sway there again.

Of the churchgoers through the still meadows

   No single one knew

What a play was played under their eyes there

   As thence we withdrew.

IN A MUSEUM

I

Here’s the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,

Which over the earth before man came was winging;

There’s a contralto voice I heard last night,

That lodges in me still with its sweet singing.

II

Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird

Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending

Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,

In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.

Exeter.

APOSTROPHE TO AN OLD PSALM TUNE

I met you first – ah, when did I first meet you?

When I was full of wonder, and innocent,

Standing meek-eyed with those of choric bent,

   While dimming day grew dimmer

      In the pulpit-glimmer.

Much riper in years I met you – in a temple

Where summer sunset streamed upon our shapes,

And you spread over me like a gauze that drapes,

   And flapped from floor to rafters,

      Sweet as angels’ laughters.

But you had been stripped of some of your old vesture

By Monk, or another.  Now you wore no frill,

And at first you startled me.  But I knew you still,

   Though I missed the minim’s waver,

      And the dotted quaver.

I grew accustomed to you thus.  And you hailed me

Through one who evoked you often.  Then at last

Your raiser was borne off, and I mourned you had passed

   From my life with your late outsetter;

      Till I said, “’Tis better!”

But you waylaid me.  I rose and went as a ghost goes,

And said, eyes-full “I’ll never hear it again!

It is overmuch for scathed and memoried men

   When sitting among strange people

      Under their steeple.”

Now, a new stirrer of tones calls you up before me

And wakes your speech, as she of Endor did

(When sought by Saul who, in disguises hid,

   Fell down on the earth to hear it)

      Samuel’s spirit.

So, your quired oracles beat till they make me tremble

As I discern your mien in the old attire,

Here in these turmoiled years of belligerent fire

   Living still on – and onward, maybe,

      Till Doom’s great day be!

Sunday

,

August

 13, 1916.

AT THE WORD “FAREWELL”

She looked like a bird from a cloud

   On the clammy lawn,

Moving alone, bare-browed

   In the dim of dawn.

The candles alight in the room

   For my parting meal

Made all things withoutdoors loom

   Strange, ghostly, unreal.

The hour itself was a ghost,

   And it seemed to me then

As of chances the chance furthermost

   I should see her again.

I beheld not where all was so fleet

   That a Plan of the past

Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet

   Was in working at last:

No prelude did I there perceive

   To a drama at all,

Or foreshadow what fortune might weave

   From beginnings so small;

But I rose as if quicked by a spur

   I was bound to obey,

And stepped through the casement to her

   Still alone in the gray.

“I am leaving you.. Farewell!” I said,

   As I followed her on

By an alley bare boughs overspread;

   “I soon must be gone!”

Even then the scale might have been turned

   Against love by a feather,

– But crimson one cheek of hers burned

   When we came in together.

FIRST SIGHT OF HER AND AFTER

A day is drawing to its fall

   I had not dreamed to see;

The first of many to enthrall

   My spirit, will it be?

Or is this eve the end of all

   Such new delight for me?

I journey home: the pattern grows

   Of moonshades on the way:

“Soon the first quarter, I suppose,”

   Sky-glancing travellers say;

I realize that it, for those,

   Has been a common day.

THE RIVAL

   I determined to find out whose it was —

   The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;

Bitterly have I rued my meanness

      And wept for it since he died!

   I searched his desk when he was away,

   And there was the likeness – yes, my own!

Taken when I was the season’s fairest,

      And time-lines all unknown.

   I smiled at my image, and put it back,

   And he went on cherishing it, until

I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,

      But that past woman still.

   Well, such was my jealousy at last,

   I destroyed that face of the former me;

Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman

      Would work so foolishly!

HEREDITY

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can

In curve and voice and eye

Despise the human span

Of durance – that is I;

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die.

“YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET”

   You were the sort that men forget;

      Though I – not yet! —

Perhaps not ever.  Your slighted weakness

   Adds to the strength of my regret!

   You’d not the art – you never had

      For good or bad —

To make men see how sweet your meaning,

   Which, visible, had charmed them glad.

   You would, by words inept let fall,

      Offend them all,

Even if they saw your warm devotion

   Would hold your life’s blood at their call.

   You lacked the eye to understand

      Those friends offhand

Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport

   Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.

   I am now the only being who

      Remembers you

It may be.  What a waste that Nature

   Grudged soul so dear the art its due!

SHE, I, AND THEY

      I was sitting,

      She was knitting,

And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;

   When there struck on us a sigh;

   “Ah – what is that?” said I:

“Was it not you?” said she.  “A sigh did sound.”

      I had not breathed it,

      Nor the night-wind heaved it,

And how it came to us we could not guess;

   And we looked up at each face

   Framed and glazed there in its place,

Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.

      Half in dreaming,

      “Then its meaning,”

Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine

   That we should be the last

   Of stocks once unsurpassed,

And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”

1916.

NEAR LANIVET, 1872

There was a stunted handpost just on the crest,

   Only a few feet high:

She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,

   At the crossways close thereby.

She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,

   And laid her arms on its own,

Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,

   Her sad face sideways thrown.

Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day

   Made her look as one crucified

In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,

   And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.

I do not think she heard.  Loosing thence she said,

   As she stepped forth ready to go,

“I am rested now. – Something strange came into my head;

   I wish I had not leant so!”

And wordless we moved onward down from the hill

   In the west cloud’s murked obscure,

And looking back we could see the handpost still

   In the solitude of the moor.

“It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid

   She heavily breathed as we trailed;

Till she said, “I did not think how ’twould look in the shade,

   When I leant there like one nailed.”

I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it.  For

you

, anyhow!”

   – “O I know there is not,” said she.

“Yet I wonder.. If no one is bodily crucified now,

   In spirit one may be!”

And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see

   In the running of Time’s far glass

Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be

   Some day. – Alas, alas!

JOYS OF MEMORY

   When the spring comes round, and a certain day

Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees

         And says, Remember,

      I begin again, as if it were new,

      A day of like date I once lived through,

      Whiling it hour by hour away;

         So shall I do till my December,

            When spring comes round.

   I take my holiday then and my rest

Away from the dun life here about me,

         Old hours re-greeting

      With the quiet sense that bring they must

      Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust,

      And in the numbness my heartsome zest

         For things that were, be past repeating

            When spring comes round.

TO THE MOON

   “What have you looked at, Moon,

      In your time,

   Now long past your prime?”

“O, I have looked at, often looked at

      Sweet, sublime,

Sore things, shudderful, night and noon

      In my time.”

   “What have you mused on, Moon,

      In your day,

   So aloof, so far away?”

“O, I have mused on, often mused on

      Growth, decay,

Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,

      In my day!”

   “Have you much wondered, Moon,

      On your rounds,

   Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds?”

“Yea, I have wondered, often wondered

      At the sounds

Reaching me of the human tune

      On my rounds.”

   “What do you think of it, Moon,

      As you go?

   Is Life much, or no?”

“O, I think of it, often think of it

      As a show

God ought surely to shut up soon,

      As I go.”

COPYING ARCHITECTURE IN AN OLD MINSTER

(

Wimborne

)

   How smartly the quarters of the hour march by

      That the jack-o’-clock never forgets;

   Ding-dong; and before I have traced a cusp’s eye,

Or got the true twist of the ogee over,

         A double ding-dong ricochetts.

   Just so did he clang here before I came,

      And so will he clang when I’m gone

   Through the Minster’s cavernous hollows – the same

Tale of hours never more to be will he deliver

      To the speechless midnight and dawn!

   I grow to conceive it a call to ghosts,

      Whose mould lies below and around.

   Yes; the next “Come, come,” draws them out from their posts,

And they gather, and one shade appears, and another,

      As the eve-damps creep from the ground.

   See – a Courtenay stands by his quatre-foiled tomb,

      And a Duke and his Duchess near;

   And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom,

And a Saxon king by the presbytery chamber;

      And shapes unknown in the rear.

   Maybe they have met for a parle on some plan

      To better ail-stricken mankind;

   I catch their cheepings, though thinner than

The overhead creak of a passager’s pinion

      When leaving land behind.

   Or perhaps they speak to the yet unborn,

      And caution them not to come

   To a world so ancient and trouble-torn,

Of foiled intents, vain lovingkindness,

      And ardours chilled and numb.

   They waste to fog as I stir and stand,

      And move from the arched recess,

   And pick up the drawing that slipped from my hand,

And feel for the pencil I dropped in the cranny

      In a moment’s forgetfulness.

TO SHAKESPEARE AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS

   Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,

   Thou, who display’dst a life of common-place,

   Leaving no intimate word or personal trace

   Of high design outside the artistry

      Of thy penned dreams,

Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.

   Through human orbits thy discourse to-day,

   Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on

   In harmonies that cow Oblivion,

   And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect

      Maintain a sway

Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked.

   And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note

   The borough clocks but samely tongued the hour,

   The Avon just as always glassed the tower,

   Thy age was published on thy passing-bell

      But in due rote

With other dwellers’ deaths accorded a like knell.

   And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe,

   And thereon queried by some squire’s good dame

   Driving in shopward) may have given thy name,

   With, “Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do;

      Though, as for me,

I knew him but by just a neighbour’s nod, ’tis true.

   “I’ faith, few knew him much here, save by word,

   He having elsewhere led his busier life;

   Though to be sure he left with us his wife.”

   – “Ah, one of the tradesmen’s sons, I now recall.

      Witty, I’ve heard.

We did not know him.. Well, good-day.  Death comes to all.”

   So, like a strange bright bird we sometimes find

   To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile,

   Then vanish from their homely domicile —

   Into man’s poesy, we wot not whence,

      Flew thy strange mind,

Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence.

1916.

QUID HIC AGIS?

I

When I weekly knew

An ancient pew,

And murmured there

The forms of prayer

And thanks and praise

In the ancient ways,

And heard read out

During August drought

That chapter from Kings

Harvest-time brings;

– How the prophet, broken

By griefs unspoken,

Went heavily away

To fast and to pray,

And, while waiting to die,

The Lord passed by,

And a whirlwind and fire

Drew nigher and nigher,

And a small voice anon

Bade him up and be gone, —

I did not apprehend

As I sat to the end

And watched for her smile

Across the sunned aisle,

That this tale of a seer

Which came once a year

Might, when sands were heaping,

Be like a sweat creeping,

Or in any degree

Bear on her or on me!

II

When later, by chance

Of circumstance,

It befel me to read

On a hot afternoon

At the lectern there

The selfsame words

As the lesson decreed,

To the gathered few

From the hamlets near —

Folk of flocks and herds

Sitting half aswoon,

Who listened thereto

As women and men

Not overmuch

Concerned at such —

So, like them then,

I did not see

What drought might be

With me, with her,

As the Kalendar

Moved on, and Time

Devoured our prime.

III

But now, at last,

When our glory has passed,

And there is no smile

From her in the aisle,

But where it once shone

A marble, men say,

With her name thereon

Is discerned to-day;

And spiritless

In the wilderness

I shrink from sight

And desire the night,

(Though, as in old wise,

I might still arise,

Go forth, and stand

And prophesy in the land),

I feel the shake

Of wind and earthquake,

And consuming fire

Nigher and nigher,

And the voice catch clear,

“What doest thou here?”

The Spectator

 1916. During the War.

ON A MIDSUMMER EVE

I idly cut a parsley stalk,

And blew therein towards the moon;

I had not thought what ghosts would walk

With shivering footsteps to my tune.

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand

As if to drink, into the brook,

And a faint figure seemed to stand

Above me, with the bygone look.

I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice,

I thought not what my words might be;

There came into my ear a voice

That turned a tenderer verse for me.

TIMING HER

(

Written to an old folk-tune

)

Lalage’s coming:

Where is she now, O?

Turning to bow, O,

And smile, is she,

Just at parting,

Parting, parting,

As she is starting

To come to me?

Where is she now, O,

Now, and now, O,

Shadowing a bou